Don't forget to tell your children they're seeing a miracle

Conventional wisdom in 1980's Washington D.C. held that three world friction points were the likeliest kickoff arenas for the dreaded World War III cataclysm: Israel and the Arabs, India and Pakistan, and North Korea and South Korea. These were considered tinder boxes requiring the most delicate of diplomatic prowess to keep small, local incidents from rapidly developing into intercontinental thermonuclear war.

Whoever is old enough to have been aware of these conflicts ever since the world faced takeover by Communists and not Muslims can appreciate the air of miraculous grandeur that permeates world events today. If you grew up after 1972 you may have watched a popular tragicomedy based on the Korean conflict in the '50's called MASH. The Korean War, a product of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, began in June, 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal force, came to the aid of South Korea. China came to the aid of North Korea, and the Soviet Union also gave some assistance to the North.

Korea was split into two regions with separate governments. Both claimed to be the legitimate government of all of Korea, and neither accepted the border as permanent. Since then the two Koreas have technically still been at war.

The conflict escalated into open warfare, and after several reversals of fortune, the fighting became a war of attrition. The United States suffered 33,686 battle deaths, along with 2,830 non-battle deaths, during the Korean War. Recent research puts the total death toll on all sides at just over 1.2 million.

An armistice was signed in 1953, created the Korean Demilitarized Zone to separate North and South Korea, but no peace treaty was ever signed and the region has been characterized by tension, belligerence, and fear until today.

Some circumstances are so entrenched in our minds and in bureaucratic inertia that only a miracle can produce the unlikely nexus of events and personalities to slash through the Gordian knot and change the course of history.

Map of Korean border standoff

צילום: iStock

If the enormity contained in the US Embassy Jerusalem move could be compared to an 800,000 watt light bulb, our conscious perception and understanding of the greatness of the event might measure somewhere around a-half-a-watt. For as long as any Jew living today can remember, the possibility of a US leader not only recognizing the truth of Israel's cause but at times even being a fiercer advocate than Israeli leadership itself and doing the things President Trump has done would have seemed as impossible as the idea that a Jewish State would arise at all just one century earlier.

Driving past a newly-hung sign directing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, I recently uttered some exclamation encapsulating what is written above, whereupon my youngest child asked, "Yeah, Tattie, what's all that about?" It was then that I realized the youth need our perspective to understand that miraculous, Divinely-guided events are taking place before their eyes, and the texts they learn from the inception of our nation about this Nation's destiny are coming alive and unfolding today.

As King David once wrote while sitting in Jewish Jerusalem, "Hallelu et Hashem b'chol ma'asav" - Rave about the Creator through all of His deeds. Tell your children that what they're seeing is far from normal. American Presidents don't traipse in to parley with their North Korean counterparts every Monday and Thursday. And the US Embassy was moved to Jerusalem in violation of every diplomatic and policy convention held by every major force on the world scene. This is also v'higadeta l'vincha - the injunction to tell our children of the miracles done for us on our way out of constricted paradigms and towards the final revelation of the Divine Hand guiding history.